Primary Source Analysis of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan

Running head: PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS
PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS
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Author Note

1PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS
Primary source also popularly known as original source are basically details or materials
that are straight related to the subject by time or by the participation. This essay is a primary
source analysis of an excerpt by Thomas Hobbes’s book “Leviathan” that was published in the
year 1651, which was one of the most powerful books introduced in the seventeenth century and
the foundational text of the social contract theory1. Leviathan critically examines the absolute
sovereignty, understanding the nature of human beings, social contract and the relationship
between each of them. Hobbes penned down the book on the background of the English Civil
War. Hobbes wrote this book as a response to his fear that he had experienced during the
political mayhem of the war. Hobbes was a personal and close advisor to then King Charles I.
Hobbes apprehended that the parliament is going to go against the king. This made him terrified
that he might be persecuted for being a Royalist and as he supported the king, thus he fled to
France. For almost eleven years, he was in France and he met many royalists who fled to France
in order to protect themselves. The company of these exiled royalists and the negative impact of
the war not only political but also economical made Hobbes write the book where he set forth a
theory that states the importance of a sovereign rule for the abolition of wars
This essay tends to argue that the idea of commonwealth and social contract theory is
necessary and a healthy process to ensure peace and harmony within the society.
In the excerpt, Hobbes introduces the commonwealth. According to him Commonwealth
is instituted when a mass of men agree on electing a person and give him the right to be the voice
or the representative of the mass. All men are entitled to obey the judgements and actions set
1 Boyle, Jen E. "Mediating Sovereignty in Thomas Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish." SEL Studies in English
Literature 1500-1900 58, no. 1 (2018): 145-168.

2PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS
forth by the rulers to live peacefully amongst themselves and to protect themselves from other
men.2 The book argues that the inescapable gruesomeness of the state of nature provides
rationality for individuals to give up their basic freedoms to obtain the security that a political
state provides even if it exists of an absolute power. Here Hobbes contradicts with theorists like
Rousseau and John Locke who came later and had different take on the social contract theory.
According to them people need not give up their rights in order to get protection and live in
harmony. Individuals can preserve their freedom and be provided with security and adequate
conditions that will ensure cooperative living. The social contract theory is a thought experiment
that Hobbes introduced due to his experience during the English Civil War that said that all
individual should have similar interest in supporting a sovereign ruler and obeying him in order
to ensure harmony and there is no war.
The Social Contract Theory put forth by Hobbes states that the State of Nature is the
condition of the lives of human beings outside of any political state or sovereign authority. It is
an imaginative recreation of what human interactions and the life of human beings be before the
establishment of political states. For Hobbes the state of nature is equivalent to a state of war
where Hobbes describes the life of a man is “Solitary, Poor, Nasty, brutish and Short” 3By war,
Hobbes does not mean war at the battlefield nor because he thinks, that human beings by nature
2 Martinich, Al P. "Authorization and representation in Hobbes’s Leviathan." In The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes,
pp. 315-338. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
3 PERRY, DAVID C., N. A. T. A. L. I. A. VILLAMIZAR-DUARTE, and M. A. Pagano. "The social contract: A
political and economic overview." Remaking the Urban Social Contract: Health, energy, and the environment.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp3–32 (2016).